The Car-to-Car Communication (C2C-Communication) discussed below is a term defined by the Car-to-Car Communication Consortium (C2C-CC), an affiliation between several automobile manufacturers. C2C-CC is developing an open industrial standard for Car-to-Car Communication and for communication between the vehicles and infrastructure devices (traffic lights, etc).
A basis for such Car-to-Car radio systems may be wireless communication systems in the form of WLANs (Wireless Local Area Networks) based on the standard defined by the IEEE under the standard descriptor 802.11, for example (see, for example: IT-Wissen, Das groβe Onlinelexikon für Informationstechnologie [IT Knowledge, The big online dictionary of information technology]).
C2X communication comprises C2C communication (Car-to-Car Communication) and communication between a vehicle and a further device, which is not a vehicle, such as an infrastructure device (traffic lights, etc.)
For Car-to-X-communication (C2X-communication), a WLAN implementation based on the 802.11p standard is conceivable, said standard not yet having been approved, however. This subform of the WLAN standard 802.11 is distinguished by the opportunity for ad-hoc communication and long ranges. Ad-hoc communication is a mode in which at least two subscribers (radio devices in vehicles, for example) communicate with one another spontaneously (ad hoc), with communication also being able to be effected from a subscriber to a final destination via a plurality of subscribers forwarding the communication as intermediate stations. Besides the ad-hoc mode communication, WLAN is also acquainted with an infrastructure mode, which operates using base stations (access point).
With the currently used radio standard based on IEEE/802.11a/b/g/n, commercially available WLAN routers have the drawback that they require relatively long setup times for the communication (channel setup latencies), which reduces applicability. However, said 802.11a/b/g/n standards have significantly higher data rates than 802.11p, which in turn makes them of interest for multimedia applications.